EMAIL: go_oosthuizen@yahoo.com
NAME: Gerhard Oosthuizen
TOPIC: Music
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Flight of Fancy in Bass
COUNTRY: South Africa
RENDERER USED: Mega-Pov 1.21
TOOLS USED: CorelDraw12 and Corel Photo-Paint12 Pov-Ray 3.61
RENDER TIME:~7hrs
HARDWARE USED: AMD Sempron 2400+ 1.67 GHz, 768 MB of RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
I was tired from the days work. I had worked overtime to make the deadline. The sun was already below the horizon. I drove slowly up the driveway and stopped in front of the garage. I left my headlights on to see the lock on the garage door. I got out and opened the door. I turned back to get into the car again. But something caught my eye. 
"Did I leave the bass in the middle of the garage?" I thought,  "Better move it..." -and then I noticed it wasn't on it's stand. The stand was still in the corner. I tried focusing my tired eyes to see what's going on. The bass guitar was actually floating in mid air! I rubbed my groggy  eyes and came closer to see what's going on. "Is this some kind of prank?" I thought, looking to see if it wasn't suspended by fishing line. Nothing. Suddenly the bass started playing by itself! It sounded like a funked up version of Paganini's 16th Caprice. Then my cars's lights started moving and changing colours like spotlights shining onto the bass. I noticed the shadows the car's lights threw on the wall. A contra-bassist. A rock-bassist. Then the shadows said "Hello. Hello?" and started slapping me in the face. Now the shadow had a face and I was lying on the floor. It was my wife's face. "Wha- what-?". I was lying in front of the closed garage-door. "You were passed out, honey. You really must take some time off after this deadline..."

This image was inspired by the 80's music video of the song "Keeping the Dream Alive" which features instruments being played by invisible musicians. My design for the bass guitar is inspired by classical and the modern styling which is depicted in the shadows playing rock and jazz.

This bass guitar that I designed would be my 5-string fretless "dream bass".

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All the wooden parts of the bass were done with bezier patches hand-coded in Pov-Ray. I drew the shadow images in Corel and then image_mapped them to triangles with no_image to make them invisible and placed them just behind the bass. The Pov-Ray logo on the amp was done in Coreldraw and exported as a font which I then used as a text object in Pov. 

I did most of the Pov moddeling in Pov-Ray 3.6 and then the final touches (motion_blur on top string) and render in MegaPov.